Australian Manufacturing Grows

Last night I was at the SEMMA (South East Melbourne Manufacturers Alliance) end of year get together at the Nissan Casting Plant in Dandenong. We were celebrating another year of Australian Manufacturing, and in particular Melbourne Manufacturing. The Nissan Casting Plant is a great example of how we can compete globally. Nissan have pulled their car assembly operation out of Australia a long time ago but the casting plant stayed and supplies their world chain.

SEMMA

And I was reminded again that not only is Australian Manufacturing not dead yet, it is in fact still growing. Check out this 5 year view of the Australian Performance of Manufacturing Index. 50 represents stable with numbers below 50 meaning it is contracting and numbers above 50 meaning it is expanding or growing. The trend line is up and it has been expanding since 2015 with only 1 month where that didn’t happen.

Australian Manufacturing PMI 2017

That is 3 years of solid growth. So some really good news for the end of 2017 and I expect it to continue into 2018.

Electric Vehicles

This is a post I started 6 years ago and decided not to publish. Since then things have changed a lot so here goes.

The History of Electric Vehicles

The Electric Vehicle has been around for a long time. The new push to Electric Vehicles is mostly being pushed by the belief that they will reduce carbon emissions. This really depends on where the power comes from, how efficient the motors are and how well the batteries work. Most studies prior to 2011 have shown that unless a substantial amount of the power comes from renewable energy then it is likely the Electric Vehicle will generate more pollution than a petrol vehicle.

Electric Vehicles began a long time before the petrol vehicle was the norm and even way before Vanguard made the first mass produced Electric Vehicle in the 1970s.

So what happened to the Electric Vehicle? The challenge today is still the same, the Battery. We really need a better solution. Which is where my original post stopped.

Guess what? It seems to have happened.

Tesla et al

So enter Elon Musk and Tesla Motors. His purpose is to take petrol off the road so they have done some pretty innovative things including opening up their patent database so anyone can use their technology with their permission.

Tesla

And of course Nissan, Toyota, Honda and many others are putting Electric Vehicles front a center in their product lines now.

With improvements in energy density storage and reducing costs for high capacity batteries we are approaching a time when Battery Electric Vehicles are the better choice for the environment, even when charged with electricity derived from fossil fuels. Studies show that there are more Emissions from the manufacture of a Electric Vehicle, but this is made up for in 1 year of operating emissions improvements and over the course of the Electric Vehicle’s life, Global Warming Emissions are halved. This assumes a 50mpg (US based study) petrol vehicle is used for the comparison. This equates to 21.3Kpl or 4.7L/100Km so this is as realistic comparison with a high efficiency petrol or diesel vehicle.

What a big different 6 years makes.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars

So how are Hydrogen Fuel Cell based cars progressing? Calculations are that it will be roughly 3 times less efficient that a Battery Electric Vehicle. And extracting the H2 also requires energy. So H2 is an energy storage source. It is hard to store and manage and so the infrastructure costs are also high. So it is hard to do. The plus is that you don’t consume any fossil fuels in the process if you use some of the new solar based extraction mechanisms so although there are big drawbacks, there are also big benefits. The following video covers the territory well including some commentary from Elon Musk toward the end.

Let’s look at another perspective which is more optimistic.

So the infrastructure just isn’t there. So it looks like Battery Electric Vehicles are still the way to go. But the advantages are big enough that the debate will continue. And it is interesting that we have multiple fuel types in use simultaneously including Petrol (gasoline), Diesel, LPG, Alcohol, Battery Electric, Hydrogen, Biodiesel, compressed air, coal, wood and others.

The big advantages for Hydrogen are:

longer operating range than battery alone but not as much as petrol/diesel/LPG

no harmful emissions when running, the same as Battery Electric Vehicles and a big improvement over petrol/diesel/LPG

Time will tell. I should put a diary entry into my calendar for 6 years time and do another comparison.

Electronex

Electronex is the Australian Electronics Manufacturing industry annual expo. This year it is at the Melbourne Park Function Centre from Wednesday 6 to Thursday 7 September 2017. You can see all the details at Electronex.

Electronex 2017

SMCBA

In parallel the SMCBA (Surface Mount & Circuit Board Association) is running their annual conference. This year the primary sessions are:

The program has two internationally renowned presenters for SMT ManufacturingVern Solberg and Phil Zarrow presenting on the topics.

Vern Solberg

Phil Zarrow

And I’m presenting 2 of the open sessions which include a look at the role PCB Design takes in the overall Product Development and the 5 areas of cost you must manage if you want to minimise the total cost of a product.

PCB Design Tradeoffs

This topic looks at the Product Development process and how PCB design fits into that. This is to do with the trade offs between product features, what you do in HW, what you do in SW and how to select the technology you want to put on the PCB based on the combination of CEM or in house capability, component lead time, test requirements and product cost.

Total cost of product ownership

The total cost of ownership of a product is a concept that looks at all the investment required to bring a product to market and manage it throughout its life cycle. It isn’t just a case of minimising R&D spend or getting the Bill of Materials to a minimum. That will usually lead to a higher cost product.

What will be presented is a model looking at the 5 major costs areas involved in the development of a product throughout its life cycle and how taking all 5 into account can enable you to get the best return on the important investment made in bringing new products to market.

It will also examine a case study where a product development delivered a next generation product to market that allowed the manufacturer to lower their price, triple their profit margin and increase their market share, all at the same time.

Successful Endeavours Exhibiting

And we are also pleased to announce that we are exhibiting this year for the first time. So if you are coming then we are at stand C1 next to Duet Electronics.

Smart Cities

This follows on from our look at Smart Cities and the technology mix being considered for how you implement them. For this post we will look at the development of a Smart City Telemetry sensor suite and the ICT communications that go with it. This is also a classic IoT case study.

I also want to point out that a Smart World will only happen if we have Smart Regions, Smart Countries, Smart States or Territories, Smart Cities and Smart Neighbourhoods.

arcHUB

My thanks go to The Active Reactor Company for giving me permission to share their story about the development of the arcHUB Telemetry sensor suite which is aimed at the Smart Cities programs as well as being more widely deployable.

arcHub Telemetry Module Logo

A few days ago I had the opportunity to speak with Daniel Mulino who is the State Member for Eastern Victoria. The picture below comes from his visit to our office in Narre Warren. The original post he made along with my explanation is here. I’m giving a more detailed explanation below including some history.

Ray Keefe – arcHUB – Daniel Mulino

For those wondering about the device I am holding, it is an arcHUBSmart Cities Telemetry module aimed at Smart Cities projects and environmental monitoring where you don’t have access to, or want the cost of, connecting up mains power. This is designed for The Active Reactor Company and is already involved in 1 Smart Cities deployment and multiple trials of low cost sensor modules by councils and government agencies in 3 states. I can’t yet provide specific details on those as they are covered by non-disclosure agreements.

To understand how we got here, it helps to know the history.

The Active Reactor Company make a product called The Active Reactor. It improves both the efficiency and the life of arc lamps such as low pressure sodium street lights, high pressure Sodium and metal halide lamps.

The Active Reactor

With the advent of LED street lighting their current product is not needed for new installations and so they wanted to secure the future of the business. So a great example of addressing an issue that will arise in the future so you are ready for it rather than just reacting to it once it happens.

Initially the new product was aimed at monitoring LED street lights. One of the big issues with LED lighting is that the LEDs either fail over time or they fade and lose brightness. Or a mixture of both. The fading is a result thermal diffusion in the semiconductor substrate. When they fall by more than 30% then you have to address that as they no longer comply with legal standards for lighting levels. The other catch is that the claimed life of 10+ years isn’t yet proven and so it is expected that there will be many lights that fail early or fade early or both.

Of course, once you have a communicating device that can monitor one thing and report it, it can also monitor other things and report them as well. Plus there were issues with being allowed to monitor the light. And where would the power come? Their inquiries with authorities responsible for the poles would not give permission to tap the power in the pole or light.

So this set us the follow set of constraints to work within:

must be battery operated

easy to install

low cost to make and also run

communicate using the cheapest data transport

monitor the LED light at night and keep track of the brightness trend

send an alert when it is persistently out of specification

field life to match the street light (10+ years)

As The Active Reactor Company talked to target users (initially the same people who buy their current product) and got an idea of what they wanted, a very different picture emerged. The people who cared about LED street lighting, also cared about micro climates, and soil moisture levels, and air quality, and foot traffic, and …

So that lead to a change of direction and a look at what else was required. The result is a device aimed at the Smart Cities market that also suits a wide range of other end customers and has the following features you won’t find combined together in conventional devices:

battery operated (either solar charged or primary cells)

minimum 2 year battery life for standard AA cell alkaline batteries

10+ day running time if solar charging is lost

up to 20 days on board non-volatile storage

compact form factor

multiple sensor types per node (up to 20)

sensor area network to minimise data costs

over the air firmware upgrades

over the air configuration updates

variable sample rates and upload timing

still has to be low cost to make and also run

easy to install

So here is the range of sensors already trialed:

wind speed (external anemometer attached)

sunlight level

night light level (street light monitoring etc)

temperature

PM2.5 particulate levels

PM10 particulate levels

Gasses – CO, H2S, SO2, NO2, H2S

Humidity

People counting (PIR based anonymous counting)

Soil moisture levels (external probe)

It is also the HUB and coordinator of a Sensor Area Network that can include modules that can measure any of the above as well as:

vibration

shock

movement

water level

GPS location

USB charger current (for usage analysis)

counting any device or system that has a pulse output

analog voltage measurements (AC and DC)

arcHUB trial at Fitzroy Gardens

The arcHUB is solar powered and includes a cellular modem to allow reporting back to a web service. It is designed to mount to a pole using straps but can easily be mounted to a wall or any other typical structure. A typical scenario is measurements every 15 minutes (except people or pulse counting which are continuous) and uploading to the web service every hour.

With the release of CAT-M1 services across Australia by Telstra, we are expecting migrate to this communications standard because it will reduce power consumption by at least a factor of 4 which will further improve battery life.

Quectel BG96 CAT-M1 Module

The arcHUB Peripheral Modules connect via 915MHz ISM Band communications and use standard AA batteries. They can run for between 2 and 5 years depending on what sensors are attached and how often they are read and reported. If you used primary lithium cells then you can expect life beyond 10 years.

The arcHUB Peripheral Modules are also capable of stand alone operation with the addition of an internally fitted cellular modem so you can have a portable people counter module that can be easily moved to a new location and doesn’t require an electrician to install it.

And pretty exciting to also announce that this is not only a designed in Australia product range, but it is also a made in Australia product range.

Again, my thanks to The Active Reactor Company for permission to share this story and if you want to know more, leave a comment and I will put you in touch with them.

Manufacturing Profits you can retire on

I was talking with one of our past clients a little while ago. They told me they had a problem. They said, “Ray, I nearly retired“! So I asked them what that meant. And they explained.

We had developed a product for them a decade ago. The total project cost then around $50,000 as it included both the product Electronics Design, Embedded Software and also the Automated Test Equipment (ATE) for Production Test which also had an Electronics Design, Embedded Software and Windows PC ATE Software component to it. And from that product they made nearly $2,000,000 in retained profit. From their perspective, nearly enough to retire on. And since they own the company it is theirs to distribute as they please. Now they wanted to do it again. So we are onto another very exciting Product Development for them. Can’t say any more about that yet.

And that ignores the total value of the economic activity and profits their suppliers and customers have made.

Return On Investment (ROI)

Manufacturing Spearheads Economic Growth

The Victorian Government estimates that every $1 spent with a business like Successful Endeavours, there is $100 of overall economic value generated for the state. Makes you wonder why they don’t invest themselves? They used to through things like the Technology Voucher Program but all of that is currently shut down.

And of course there are the jobs this generates. Again, Victorian Government estimates are that every job in manufacturing creates another 5 jobs around it in the supply chain and supporting businesses. That is the highest ratio of any industry.

creates fundamental value (so the service sector has something to leverage off)

creates jobs and then more indirect jobs than any other industry so it is great for employment

creates profits

And far from being in decline, the Australian Manufacturing PMI has been in growth most of the past 2 years so that is also really positive for the overall economy. Check out he graph below from the Australian Industry Group (AIG).

Australia Manufacturing PMI 2015-2017 shows growth the whole way

The above graph was created by Trading Economics. They provide a a useful way to use the AIGAustralian Manufacturing PMI figures to get reports in the format you want. If you explore it more deeply, you can see that we took a hit to Australian Manufacturing during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) but it has been an upward trend from then on.

Programming languages

It is 2016 and we are a long way from the 1970s. So of course the world has moved on. Today’s programming has advanced significantly and we have super low powered systems of extraordinary capacity and easy to program securely. Surely!

This isn’t the first time we have done this. If you go back to Top Programming Languages 2015 you will see that C was second and Java was first. This year, C is first. A 1970s language is back to being first for all programming in 2016. Why?

In 2016 devices shipped in the product category known as the Internet of Things exceeded all other mainstream electronics device categories. Take all mobile phones, tablet computers and iPads, desktop computers, netbooks, laptops, servers and general computing devices combined, and this is less than the value of products shipped in the category of the Internet of Things.

And this is what is driving the use of the C programming Language. For these small, low powered, low cost, essential to our future devices, have to be programmed in something that lets you get close to the hardware so you can manage it, and also operate in a high level language. My hat goes off to Dennis Richie and KenTompson who developed this language in the early 1970s and gifted it to us all. Their vision has carried an entire civilisation forward.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

So more than 40 years later, I am still very grateful for their foresight, vision and competence in creating the most used computing language on earth today.

CEDA Manufacturing Symposium 2016

The Casey Cardinia Region was a major sponsor of this particular symposium, also know as the Manufacturing and Future Industries Forum, and so this meeting included some region specific statistics. So here they are:

Casey Cardinia Region is headed for 650,000 people over the next 20 years

Manufacturing accounts for more than 50% of GDP in Melbourne’s south East

135 babies a week a born – hence Monash health referring to it as nappy valley 🙂

70% of resident workers have to travel outside the region for work

Casey Cardinia Region

Australian Manufacturing History

Committee for Economic Development of Australia

Manufacturing GDP in Australia has halved since then 1980s. This is offset by the rise in finance, mining and health. Looking at recent history it grew slightly from 2000 to 2008 then slowly dropped back to the same level today and for the past 10 months has grown each month.

Manufacturings declining percentage of GDP is due to holding its output level while GDP grows.

Employment has been the biggest reduction at 18% decline or 200,000 jobs; mostly in Victoria and South Australia.

Food and beverage is the biggest category followed by machinery and equipment which includes automotive. Construction and building materials has held its own in the light of recent Senate enquiries into sub-standard and non-conforming product being imported. This has led to an advantage in quality confidence for local products showing it isn’t just about price. This has also been assisted by the rise in residential construction on the eastern and South eastern sea board.

Michael Green made the point that Advanced Manufacturing meant the value add must go beyond the quality and cost story to the customer. So not getting the attention of the chief purchasing office, but instead of the new product or strategic technology alliance executive.

Dr Cathy Foley explained that we underestimate the value of thinking globally. CSIRO has a national remit but recognises it needs to help businesses achieve international competitiveness. And now they can help sole traders get to a breakthrough technology and not just focus on big players. In one project Cathy used their superconducting technology to create a new magnetic field detector to improve exploration efficiency.

CSIRO

Julie Tooth was asked if we had squandered our energy advantage? She explained that we used to have a cost advantage but that has now gone. Renewable investment has also been unreliable due to frequent changes in policy at both federal and state levels. Other policy and trade agreement activity has also muddied rather than clarified future direction.

AIG – Australian Industry Group

Dr Cathy Foley explained that the exit of girls from STEM needs to be seriously addressed. And where there is take-up, what we aren’t seeing is progressing into leadership and management roles. With our growing Asian background and proximity to Asia not being taken advantage of. We need to be wary of creating a social divide between higher socio-economic areas where you get access to coding and technology skills and those living in lower income areas or rural and remote communities do not.

Can we make high technology devices here?

Michael Green stated that this needs investment in the infrastructure.

Dr Cathy Foley noted that researchers stop short of delivering a full solution – traditionally this has been the case but it is increasingly becoming obvious that that path from fundamental research to applied research to full manufacturing capability including process technology improvement.

Michael Green explained that new manufactured products will have digital products and artefacts alongside it.

Improving collaboration?

It isn’t just a case of university to business collaboration. A business needs to collaborate with a broad range of other businesses including their own customers. So it isn’t a simple issue. A supply chain needs multiple entities and it isn’t just a case of dealing directly with the end customer but also supporting all the intermediates so the whole ecosystem end to end.

The CSIRO lean start-up program is focusing researchers on creating product product opportunities and engaging with potential customers and making sure they really need it.

And although I can’t yet give you details yet, we are involved in the development of one of the lean start-up products.

National Manufacturing Week 2016

And again we are supporting the Casey Cardinia Region. This year we are in stand 2216 which is a lot more central that 2 years ago.

Casey Cardinia Region

You can also check out the directory entry for Successful Endeavours though if you are familiar with us there will be no surprises there.

So if you are thinking of dropping in to the exhibition then please come and say hello. Melbourne might be the manufacturing capital of Australia, but there are still a large number of significant manufacturers in Sydney including a growing biomedical device manufacturing cluster. And we have clients in Sydney and so are hoping to catch up with some of them.

We are also 3D Printing in house now and so I’m personally interested in what is happening with 3D Printing and will be checking out that part of the exhibition.

3D Printing

3D Printing has been a big topic for some time. It works in a number of different ways and you can print in metals, plastic or paper. For this post, I will focus on FDM or Fused Deposition Modelling. It is also a method within the general area of Additive Manufacturing.

We work with a wide range of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design companies and I had expected them to all be right into 3D Printing. But I was wrong. So we decided to do it ourselves. Here is what we were looking for:

cost under $5K

more than 1 filament material type

readily available filament (overnight delivery preferred)

0.1mm resolution

fully enclosed

can run stand alone (you don’t need to have it permanently connected to a computer)

automatic material detection

upgradable nozzles and software

What we ended up selecting did all of the above but the price point was under $2K! The unit is an Automaker from Robox.

CEL-Robox Automaker

3D Printer Application

So after making a few of the sample models that came with the unit, it was time to start using it in a real project. One set of negatives about 3D Printing is that it is slow and noisy. So even though we selected a fully enclosed unit, it was still too noisy to sit in the middle of the office. So we relocated it to the workroom where we do the more mechanical tasks. We also had to decide how we would create 3D Models. So lets go through the whole process.

For the project, we needed a custom spacer for a 4-20mA current output voltage sensor. We were redesigning a product that had gone obsolete. Our client only needed 50 of them to replace failed units in the field and for spares over time. Having designed the Printed Circuit Board we now needed a spacer that would allow us to use an insulated case TO220 NPN transistor in place of a TO3 NPN Transistor.

3D Model Creation

The first step is to create a 3D Model of the shape we needed. This turned out to be much easier than we expected. We don’t do mechanical CAD in house so we elected to try an online tool. The tool we selected is TinkerCAD. It works in your browser and you can download an STL file which is the format most 3D Printers can use.

TinkerCAD online 3D Design

The software works by letting you add shapes together to make an object. You can also turn any shape into a hole. And you can set the height and location of any object including its elevation. This was more than enough to handle this project. Above is a screenshot of the completed model. We then downloaded it and fed it into the CEL-Robox 3D Printer.

3D Printing in Action

This is a small part and only took 12 minutes to print.

3D Printed Spacer

So now we have our Custom Electronics Spacer. And at a small fraction of the time and cost of getting it drawn up mechanically and made by someone else.

Electronics Prototype

This is perfect. Now we can get to testing the new design and hand it over to our client for them to evaluate and approve.

3D Printing Creates New Opportunities

Having done this one exercise, I can see enormous possibilities for this technology a Successful Endeavours. Not only can it save time and cost like it did for this project, but it allows us to do new things we might not have tried before. For lower volume products, you can afford the tooling for custom injection moulded parts, but now we don’t need to.

PACE Zenith Awards

The PACE Zenith Awards 2015 celebrate the process control and automation industry’s many and diverse successes. The PACE Zenith Awards bring together some of the biggest names in Process Control, Instrumentation and Automation to celebrate, recognise and award companies and individuals for their key contribution to Australian industry.

The awards winners were announced at the PACE Zenith Awards dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel Sydney on June 11th 2015.

This year we were finalists in 4 categories with the Power and Energy Management category having 2 projects selected as finalists.